NOTED WITH PLEASURE

Published: May 14, 1989

Itinerant Therapy What if psychotherapy were to come out of the closet and walk around in the world with the patient, like two peripatetic philosophers? This is how Max, the hero of Sara Vogan's novel ''Loss of Flight'' (Bantam), sees his patients.

As a therapist, Max held the very real impression that people walked into an office for an hour a day with a prepared story to tell to a captive audience. . . . He met his patients in an atmosphere of their own choice where they felt they could talk. He drew the line at bars and shopping malls. Likewise, he felt the traditional fifty-minute hour was designed as a luxury for the therapist at the expense of the patient. Max treated people in blocks, four hours a day, one day a week, rather than the traditional one hour, four days a week. Sometimes he found himself in art galleries and museums, strolling through exhibits he never really saw. Last year he met a woman at Alcatraz, riding the ferry over and back. Often he visited his patients in their homes, like Barbara Landestoi and Jacob Epter. Vincent Dolack liked to drive out to the country, since his wife was an invalid and Vincent spent most of his time cooped up in the house taking care of her. The Frankensteins of Criticism

Sometimes professional critics just can't stop. They lose the capacity ''to be without a description of to be,'' as the poet Wallace Stevens put it. Here Hutchins Hapgood, an old friend, describes the art critic Leo Stein. He's quoted in ''Cezanne and America: Dealers, Collectors, Artists and Critics, 1891-1921'' by John Rewald with Frances Weitzenhoffer (Princeton University).

Whenever I think of Leo Stein, I like him better than when I am with him. He couldn't leave the slightest subject without critical analysis. He and I argued the livelong days. . . . He was almost always mentally irritated. The slightest flaw, real or imaginary, in his companion's statements, caused in him intellectual indignation of the most intense kind. And there seemed to be something in him which took it for granted that anything said by anybody except himself needed immediate denial or at least substantial modification. He seemed to need constant reinforcement of his ego, in order to be certain that all was well with the world and that God was in his heaven. On All Fours With Dr. Arnold

No human being ever took himself more seriously than the Victorian educator Thomas Arnold, the legendary headmaster of the Rugby School - which makes this intimate scene with his 10 children all the more pleasant. This is from Lytton Strachey's ''Eminent Victorians: The Illustrated Edition'' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

In this large and growing domestic circle his hours of relaxation were spent. There those who had only known him in his professional capacity were surprised to find him displaying the tenderness and jocosity of a parent. The dignified and stern headmaster was actually seen to dandle infants and to caracole upon the hearthrug on all fours. Yet, we are told, ''the sense of his authority as a father was never lost in his playfulness as a companion.'' On more serious occasions, the voice of the spiritual teacher sometimes made itself heard. An intimate friend described how ''on a comparison having been made in his family circle, which seemed to place St. Paul above St. John,'' the tears rushed to the Doctor's eyes and how, repeating one of the verses from St. John, he begged that the comparison might never again be made. The longer holidays were spent in Westmoreland, where . . . Dr. Arnold enjoyed, as he himself would often say, ''an almost awful happiness.'' Posthumous Tough Luck

The 19th-century poet Alfred de Musset wanted a willow over his grave, but like most of the desires of romantic poets, this one was frustrated, as we see in ''Willa Cather in Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey,'' edited by George N. Kates (University of Nebraska).

This willow requested by the poet has become a subject of mirth even among Parisians, whose sense of the ridiculous is almost entirely lacking. Ever since 1857 gardener after gardener has tried to make a willow tree grow over the tearful singer's grave, but the soil of Pere-Lachaise is high and sandy, and the result of fifty years of effort is a spindling yellow seedling, five feet high, so nearly dead that its shade is as light as even so sensitive a gentleman could have wished it. De Musset certainly never got anything that he wanted in life, and it seems a sort of fine-drawn irony that he should not have the one poor willow he wanted for his grave. On the other hand, no one ever quite so thoroughly enjoyed the idea of missing all he wanted, and the condition of this willow would certainly delight his artistic sense as a most effective instance of the relentlessness of a destiny of which he was never tired of complaining. A Breathless Guffaw

How would the slapstick of early Hollywood films strike us now? This is Walter Kerr, the drama critic, writing about them 70 years later. He's quoted in ''Chaplin: His Life and Art'' by David Robinson (McGraw-Hill).

There is very little in the Sennett films, for all their breakneck pace and bizarre manhandling of the universe, that one would care to call humor under analytic examination. Normally it is possible to understand a joke that has faded, to recapture the principle that once provoked laughter while being unable to capture the laughter itself. . . . Not so with Sennett for the most part. The jokes, as jokes, are rarely there . . . and all the activity is so headlong that there is scarcely time to pause for the ''constructive'' quality of a jest. . . . The films are successful agitations, successful explorations of elaborate visual possibilities; if laughter once accompanied them, it has to have been the laughter of breathlessness.